On D-Day we were shocked, and I, as well as the others, we were defending ourselves, we wanted to survive. They were not our enemy … we did not know them, and we had no chance to say yes or no to what was happening.

The opponent wanted to ‘defeat’ us, as it was called in those days, and we did our best in order to repel this opponent, and we did not think about the individual human being. When the landing troops arrived, we said that on every single boat there were more soldiers then in our entire bay of six kilometres.

Each ship had a few hundred, and we had about three to four hundred. Each resistance post had 20 to 25, and each boat was spitting out 30, 50, 100. In the beginning our artillery, which was already trained at the beach, was showing us the aim. And the artillery did manage to bring the attack to a stop in the first two to three hours.

I hoped I would manage to get back, I went on small paths, not on the main road. I heard that later comrades had fallen who had tried to rescue themselves by taking the main road. We did not think of withdrawal, we were only thinking about holding our position, defending and hoping to survive.

But we were trained beforehand to fight to the last. You have to hold the position. Also before, when there were discussions, nobody ever mentioned withdrawal, only ever fighting in order to hold back the invasion.

The ship artillery was the worst, before the first landing boats came out, there was like a wall of fire coming towards us. It was very - what can I say - well I started praying loudly. And have tried through the praying not to think about what is coming towards us. I just made these quick prayers.